The Commission wants to promote e-procurement in the EU with measures such as a call for applications for participation in a new, informal expert group on e-tendering or monitor the use of e-procurement across Member States. The aim of these measures is to help Member States to accelerate the switchover to e-procurement, and to enable suppliers to take part in online procurement procedures across the single market.

The Commission launched measures to promote e-procurement. E-procurement is the use of electronic communications and transaction processing by governments and other public sector organisations when buying supplies and services or tendering public works. For the Commission is important to boost its use because it can deliver significant savings to European taxpayers.

The concrete measures presented by the Commission are launching a call for applications for participation in a new, informal expert group on e-tendering. Also, launching of work-stream on e-procurement monitoring and benchmarking starting to monitor the use of e-procurement across Member States, in order to promote best practices. And, publishing the responses to the e-procurement Green Paper which reveal considerable support for making the use of e-procurement compulsory in the EU. In October 2010, the Commission launched the consultation within the Green Paper. 

Full conversion to e-procurement can save between €50 and €70 billion per year according to recent Deutsche Bank research. The forthcoming revision of EU public procurement rules will seek to integrate the potential of e-procurement. The measures launched by the Commission will help to identify technical and practical solutions which can help to give full expression to the new legislative provisions when they take effect.